Pasted a list of devices below...When can we get some benchmarks. You guys act as though nothing is out. How hard is it to get a device to benchmark? Surely Xiaomi, Toshiba, Bungbungame etc want their devices benchmarked? Xiaomi runs at 1.8 (or 1.9 depends on who you believe I guess), so scores close to shield already as benchmarks have shown (faster than S800 in a LOT of stuff). When will we get some xiaomi benchmarks? It's Tegra4 at 1.8 in a PHONE right? $327? WOW. I don't see them bragging about the 2.3ghz S800 version either (since the phone comes with either chip, you'd think they are bragging about the winner right?).

A paste of a comment I made elsewhere:T4 just started shipping end of July (basically only just over a month). Not sure how you can call it a failure yet:http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/03/toshiba-launches...2 toshibas with T4 (and a 3rd with a T3)Vizio has a T4 (and T3) coming also that they showed at CESAlso the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity,HP SlateBook x2 & an AIO device (20in?) both T4, not to mentionMad Catz MOJO (they are SEEKING deal T4 they said).BungBungame's Kalos tablet uses T4 alsoXiaomi Mi3 handsethttp://www.phonearena.com/news/Xiaomi-Mi3-scores-h...Looks like T4 owns the top of the list right? Xiaomi phone is impressive.http://www.nextpowerup.com/news/1949/acer-prepping...Acer with TA2 coming with T4Of course shield, and now maybe a tegra tab7 Q1?Surface RT rev2 coming shortly (I think RT kills anything, but it's another device)Couple those with Ouya, gamepop, wikipad etc and I think tegra has a pretty good year lined up even before the T4i. Hp, Toshiba, Microsoft, Asus, Acer all showing tegra 4 support.http://www.phonearena.com/news/NVIDIAs-rumored-Teg...ZTE also has U988S phone coming. I'm sure I'm missing a few devices but these are already coming.Reply

You can be sure that Xiaomi, Toshiba, Bungbungame, etc. want their devices benchmarked and reviewed all you want. The fact is, most of those companies are not pushing hard for reviews, certainly not by us. If any of them were to contact us with a review sample, I'd happily do a review.Reply

Is that a standard practice ? I thought tech sites/blogs are at last emailing for a review unit - especially for some of the more exotic hardware(like 40+ mpx phones). Meh, in that case I retract my previous whining on the abundance of the reviews.Reply

We email companies regularly, yes, but not every company really wants an AnandTech depth review, and there's also the question of how many reviews any person can pull off. A full laptop review for instance requires pretty much a solid week of work (around 40 hours), which means if I have three laptops on my plate already, I'm not going to go around emailing companies asking for [generic laptop x]. On the tablet and smartphone side, it's pretty much the same story, and the choice is either to seriously curtain the detail in a review or else focus on a more limited number of products.Reply

they get either what they own, or what they are sent. They do not go out and purchase hardware for the sake of reviewing it. They already benched shield, which is T4 at its best and it wasnt overly impressive.Reply

In 32-bit mode A7 does beat Shield on Geekbench even without HW acceleration of AES. They are close though, a 2GHz A15 would get similar performance as a 1.3GHz A7. However A7 shines in 64-bit mode, pulling well ahead, not because of HW AES but primatily due to the new 64-bit ARM ISA. Until we get A57 I'd expect A7 to remain the fastest ARM.Reply

You picked up one example only. Let me take a different one: In 3Dmark CPU physics test, T4 is 2 times faster than A7. So why take Geekbench and not 3DMark ?And I don't agree that A7 will remain the fastest ARM SoC until A57. in 3 months, Nvidia Logan with A15 R4 on HPM at 2.3Ghz will blow away A7 in both CPU and GPU...Reply

Obviously in multithreaded tests T4 will win due to having twice as many cores as A7. Apple could easily make a quad core version if they wanted, but core for core A7 will be unbeaten for quite a while.

Logan is officially in Q2 next year, so if it will be out before the end of this year that would be amazing - but very unlikely. At least in Geekbench I don't think 2.3GHz will be enough to equal A7 on INT and FP in 64-bit mode but should beat it in 32-bit mode.Reply

Exactly how much AES encryption do you expect to do on your phone/tablet?...ROFL. Probably about as much as I plan on doing content creation on one. How much 64bit crap do you think matters in the next year on a phone/tablet? Or even the year after? Not much.

I want games out to TV with a gamepad so I have no need for a console. Portable movies/games/browsing when on the go. I don't use a tablet for encryption. It's kind of like having DX11.2 on a tablet. Turning on all it's features would result in 1fps.

If T4 was super fast at making hamburger, I'd tell you they wasted their engineering time too :) I don't make hamburger with my tablet :) It's about the games silly, not encryption (maybe one day your comment makes sense, not today and not in a phone/tablet). Also Apple is a small portion of the entire market and walled off on top of that. Apple will continue to shrink until they make gaming the central point of their devices (they do have a console coming, but where is the 1B+ game announcement like MS for xbox1?).

Enterprise mail made Rimm special. Everyone has it now, so down goes rimm. Appstore, Retina etc made apple special, but now everyone has all that crap and a good soc, so down goes apple. Modems made Qcom special, but now everyone has one out or coming early next year in a soc, so down goes qcom (check their margins/ Qreport - trend is down now). The new THING to have is GAMING, which at least to QCOM credit they hired 30 devs to show off their tech (though we've seen nothing yet, and they don't make a single game, just to show off stuff). NV and maybe AMD if they hurry, is about to take 20yrs of that experience and slap it's desktop gpu into a SOC. Tegrazone already has a pretty huge lead (surely working with Valve on steambox etc will further NV branding). Kepler is already very well known inside and out by game devs, so making stuff compatible with Kepler Mobile will be an easy task (same with AMD stuff coming providing they start making money to fund a decent race year after year). Don't forget the people that were kings in SOC GPU's were sent there by AMD/NV. IMG.L (who makes all apple gpus) failed on the desktop long ago and ran to NON gaming devices (phones/tablets etc-pre gaming this last year). Now they are becoming GAMING devices...LOL. Guess what happens next :)

IMG.L is broke BTW (had to borrow 20mil just to buy 100mil mips company). Being good at gaming takes 3 things. Good/great hardware, GREAT drivers, and working well with game DEVS. Only NV/AMD have 20yrs of experience in these 3 areas and AMD is broke and in debt (while NV has 3B cash, no debt) as their drivers have been showing for the last two years, giving up the cpu race to Intel, and wasting money on making crap for consoles which are dying (see sales of wiiu, vita, 3ds recently and predictions for them all going forward) etc. Mobile is the next thing and gaming on them to your TV will kill consoles (and console margins are awful for AMD unless they can get to the casual gamer years). It only has to be good enough early, and great over the next few years to stall CASUAL gamers from ever buying a console in years 3-8.

A7 isn't taking over the world, and fewer people plan on buying an iphone every year now as android is just as good and so are their socs. IE Galaxy S4 sells a lot yes? Check Apple's Stock price ;) The new iphone isn't impressive. Nobody was saying WOW this time in reviews.

Hardly. It's faster in a few specific corner cases I'm sure, but in most use cases quad-core is just more than tablets need and individually faster dual cores work better. In another 2-3 years, maybe that won't be true, but for now it is. Even then, never did I suggest that the A7 is "way ahead" of the competition. Here's what I said:

"As far as performance goes, Tegra 4 is quite fast but it looks like it will be slower than the new A7 at the heart of the iPhone 5s. GPU performance is a bit murkier, with Tegra 4 sometimes doing well (GFXBench 2.7.0 T-Rex HD and Egypt HD for instance have it on par with the A7 and Qualcomm MSM8974), but other times it falls behind (fill rate in particular looks to be a weak point – or a strong point of the A7 GPU). Given the variety of Android tablets along with NVIDIA’s willingness to help optimize gaming performance, however, we expect Tegra 4 will remain competitive."

Being "slower than the A7" can mean 10% or so, and in many cases that's what we're seeing. Performance overall is "competitive" -- not class leading, but not bad by any means.Reply

you cherry pick the benchs for your claims. I can do the same with 3DMark CPU Physics where Tegra4 is 2 times faster than A7... and it's not class leading ? yeah all depends on how you view it... Reply

As noted, quad-core aware applications that people truly use on tablets are a rarity. 3DMark Physics is a perfect example of a benchmark that scales well with cores but doesn't really represent what most apps or even games are doing.

You want to talk about cherry picking, even mentioning 3DMark Physics is a perfect example of that. I didn't even cite any specific benchmarks, so I couldn't have "cherry picked". All I said is that in general, it looks like A7 will still be faster than Tegra 4 (and that will be especially true if we compare A7 in a tablet with Tegra 4 in a tablet, or put Tegra 4 in a phone to compare with the iPhone 5s).

TL;DR - Don't get so upset that NVIDIA's Tegra 4 SoC isn't at the top of the performance charts. Tegra 3 and Tegra 2 didn't manage that either, but they still work okay. If you want the fastest SoC in a tablet, however, you're going to be upgrading fairly often.Reply

I don't work for Nvidia nor I own their shares. And I can say the same about S800 that I consider faster than A7.oooh one last thing, I hope you will not get upset about A7 low performance when you will get Logan in hands ;)Reply

I won't get upset either way -- why would I? I don't own an iPhone, and in fact the only Apple product in my house is a 4th Gen iPod Touch. I have a Tegra 2 tablet and a Tegra 3 tablet, as well as a no-name Mediatek tablet (LePan Tab II if you're curious). Tegra 2 is a bit painful to use, but Tegra 3 is at least okay, and ironically the Mediatek tablet is in some cases faster than the Acer A700 T3 tablet. (Faster clocked dual-cores vs. slower clocked quad-cores, donchaknow.)

But I'm sure glad to know how much you're looking forward to Logan. Let's see... Tegra 4 was first seen in working hardware how long ago? And we're still not done at the point where there are a lot of Tegra 4 devices, not by a long shot. So when Logan arrives some time next year (probably later in the year, judging by this year), and it's still 28nm but basically double or triples the GPU performance of the current Tegra 4, it will be competing with the next generation of SoCs, and some of those will be 20nm.

Anyway, you may not own any NVIDIA shares, and you may think S800 is faster than A7 as well. In some cases, it is. In general use, however, I think Apple's A7 will come out ahead of most if not all of the current crop of SoCs. Silvermont is right in the same ballpark for CPU performance, but it has a weaker GPU so it's an easy win for the A7. But then, as I noted already, coming out "ahead" isn't a huge deal if the difference is only 5% or even 10-20%. There are other factors that are far more important in any device, like the display, apps, build quality, battery life, etc.Reply

"I won't get upset either way -- why would I?"really ? comon, Anandtech is notorious for being an Apple and Intel PR machine ! That's why I joked about Logan.And talking about Logan, I'm very surprised that you don't have better source. Samples are at OEMs since July, 3 months sooner than T4. Logan devices should be introduced in Spring 2014. It will come in HPM process instead of HPL, giving nearly half node advantage compare to T4. We are talking about 20~30% better electrical performance. That's why S800 is clocked at 2.2~2.3Ghz instead of 1.5~1.7Ghz for S600...In other hand 20nm at TSMC will come to end-users at very very end of 2014, early 2015...Reply

Just like to say that even though I seem to have started this rather unproductive discussion, I definitely think it has gone way out of hand, I actually went back to try and edit my post (I cannot find any options to edit) because I thought it was too harsh.

Also I would like to clarify that what I meant with way ahead was that saying that the cyclone CPU which runs in a really rather small phone is more powerful than the actively cooled CPU in the shield it seems to me that you are claiming that apple is a long long way ahead in terms of CPU technology. And I truly believe that tegra 4 would give better performance even in single core scenarios if the software was more similarly optimized. It does seem true that the A7 is ahead of it's competitors in terms of performance relative to power consumption, but I do think you are overstating the differences. However it was more a general comment about the content on this site than to you in particular.

I had a similar issue when snapdragon 600 came out and Brian seemed to find huge performance improvements on top of the frequency increase compared to S4 Pro, but if you look at other S4 Pro based units the difference is hardly bigger than the frequency increase would indicate. My main issue is that there is a big tendency to attribute every performance improvement as an improvement in hardware, and given the state of mobile benchmarks that's not even remotely true. All the benchmarks in the iPhone 5s review were run on brand new OS with a brand new browser, and the review hardly considers that and instead in my opinion goes a long way in confirming apples statement about desktop like performance. Reply

While the javascript benchmarks are heavily dependent on the browser (well, at least SunSpider is), they're hardly the only tests that were run. Part of the problem is that there aren't that many cross platform benchmarks available outside of the browser -- and we use most of those. Geekbench, Basemark X, WebXPRT hit the CPU in differing ways and combined with other tests we can get a pretty good idea about the overall CPU performance.

More importantly, looking at iPhone 5/5c with iOS 7 relative to iPhone 5s tells us a lot about the performance of A7. I don't think anyone would try to say the A6 SoC is horribly slow, and with A7 basically outperforming it by 30-100% (with the average being closer to 40% -- just eyballing here, though, so I'm not trying to be precise!).... Anyone suggesting A7 isn't an impressive bump in performance over the existing chips is trying to shovel something.

Cortex-A15 is fast, sure, but power efficiency is at best suspect. (Which isn't to say it's not more efficient than some other CPUs/SoCs.) Apple went off on their own with Swift precisely because they didn't feel A15 was what they wanted. With their size and income, Apple actually has the ability to really start to push things if they want, and we're seeing that now. 5-10 years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple designed processors outpacing most of the stuff from AMD...and that may start to happen before 5 years even.

At the end of the day, I'm a technology enthusiast, and so people doing interesting things with technology are what excites me, even if I don't ever buy the product in question. Intel has done that for decades now, NVIDIA and AMD do it to varying degrees with GPUs (and now SoCs), and Apple is... well, for a change we're seeing a lot more on the hardware side rather than just the software side. I don't care for OS X (or Linux), and I didn't like MacOS back in the day; the massive following of Apple fanatics doesn't help.

But that doesn't mean I can't be impressed by some of what they're doing, and the A7 is a lot more than I was expecting from the "S-cycle refresh" out of Cupertino. Is it the best thing ever? Nope, and things are now complex enough that there are always going to be use cases where no single chip is fastest in every way. Will Logan be better when it ships? Maybe, but right now A7 is shipping and available and Logan is at best a long shot to come out in volume before the end of the year.

FWIW, I do like some aspects of iOS, but at the end of the day I still prefer my Android devices. Price is a big factor though; if I had the money, you can bet I'd be buying an iPhone 5s and an iPad 4.Reply

You're right. I did a web search on "Ramos Technology has partnered with Intel..." and found the exact same post in dozens of places. So now, your post and my post (as well as the post by ArthurG above) are orphaned, but the spam is gone. :-)Reply

I like the HP Slate8 in 4:3 but did not like the back side of the tablet in only plastic white. I may get it anyways if the price is low enough; but my heart is kind of set on the iPad Mini Retina. Reply